Wake Read Free Page B

as soon as I can. Over.’
    â€˜Tre,’ said Belle, ‘what’s going on?’
    â€˜I don’t know.’
    â€˜So—you haven’t got things under control?’
    Theresa looked at Curtis Haines. He just stared back, his hands wandering over his wife’s silky grey bob.
    Theresa tried to pull herself together. In her best, steely, police officer voice, she said, ‘Just do what I say, Belle. Over and out.’
    A truck horn sounded somewhere to the west.
    â€˜I should probably check that out,’ Theresa said to Curtis. Then she routinely attempted once more to raise anyone else. There was nobody. She clipped her radio back onto her vest, got up, and stooped to gather Adele Haines’s legs in her arms. Curtis took Adele’s shoulders and together they lifted her.
    â€˜Shall we use your car?’ Curtis said.
    Theresa didn’t want to retrace her steps. For a moment she was lost in blank indecision. She only came back when Curtis spoke. He told her that his car was the Volvo up the road, opposite the hairdresser. ‘If that’s better,’ he said, and she heard the kindness and concern in his tone.
    They set out, and he led the way.
    Curtis Haines and his wife Adele hadn’t planned to stop in Kahukura, but when they got to the turn for the bypass Curtis spotted an antiques and collectibles shop. Adele was looking at the hairdresser on the other side of the road— Curl up and Dye . She laughed and pointed. Curtis smiled, then waited for his wife to notice that he was pulling over, and why. He waited for her face to light up. He loved watching her face light up.
    Adele saw the shop. ‘Thank you, darling.’ She flipped her sun visor down, refreshed her lipstick, and got out of the car.
    Curtis changed the CD. He reclined his seat and closed his eyes. He drifted off for a few minutes. It couldn’t have been long, because the CD was only on track two: ‘How High the Moon’.
    What woke Curtis was a police car. It blasted past, sirens going. It went about half a kilometre down the road, then screeched to a stop. Its brake lights flashed and flickered. Its siren gave a few further whoops, as though in protest, then cut out.
    There was something threatening in the silence beyond the car’s sealed windows. Curtis turned off the stereo and let his window down. After a minute he heard, from somewhere up ahead, a woman shouting, her voice hysterical. Surely not the police officer. Whoever it was sounded as if they were trying to shout the world back into its proper order.
    Curtis looked over at the antiques shop and saw that a strange woman had hold of his wife. The woman was younger than Adele, but nevertheless wore spectacles on a chain, as some elderly women do. The spectacles were balanced in the woman’s spray-sculpted hair, their chain flapping against her cheeks as she was wrenched back and forth by Adele, who was struggling to free herself. Adele clawed at the woman’s arms, while the woman held Adele’s jaw open and dropped things into her mouth.
    Curtis didn’t know how he got out of the car. Later he remembered the dimpled brass of the shop’s door handle in his grip and the cheery sound of the bell above the door. As it was, he simply found himself at his wife’s side.
    It was coins that the woman was posting between Adele’s lips—lumpy coins, not perfectly round. Old coins, of blackened silver and greened copper.
    Curtis grabbed the woman and shoved her away. He heard the money fall and roll about on the wooden floor.
    Adele didn’t make a sound.
    The woman staggered back, then regained her balance and looked about. Her eyes were so wide that Curtis could see the strained pink fibres connecting her eyeballs to her eyelids.
    There was a fireplace in the shop—not one that worked, for it was filled with a brass coal scuttle crowded with dried hydrangeas. There was a fire-set on its hearth, and